Then Play Long

Wednesday, 21 December 2016

Track listing:
Innuendo/I’m Going Slightly Mad/Headlong/I Can’t Live With You/Don’t Try So
Hard/Ride The Wild Wind/All God’s People/These Are The Days Of Our Lives/Delilah/The
Hitman/Bijou/The Show Must Go On

Freddie Mercury’s blackstar,
not that anyone who didn’t need to know knew that at the time, but to a degree
that the opening song sounds remarkably similar in construction to the song “Blackstar,”
though in a different key (“Innuendo”’s root chord is E major, compared with “Blackstar”’s
B major), and that both albums end with a kind of protective defiance – “The Show
Must Go On” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away.”

If, as surely everybody involved was aware, Innuendo was to be the last Queen album
with Freddie, as such – leaving aside entry #541 for now – then everybody
appears to have pulled together to go out with a bang. If anything, Mercury’s
illness had intensified the group’s concentration, such that they sounded more
alive than anything they had done since Sheer
Heart Attack. Rockers like “Headlong,” “I Can’t Live With You” and
especially “The Hitman” find the group at their best and most dynamic.

More importantly, despite his illness, Freddie sounds as
though he’s having the time of his life on the record. Whooping it up, multi-tracking,
self-parodying but concentrated, he revels in the music, having a great deal of
fun with “I’m Going Slightly Mad” – a song whose lyric was in part conjured up
in discussions with Mercury and his friend Peter Straker, and a song which
suggests some awareness of what their labelmates the Pet Shop Boys were up to
at the time; indeed, Brian May’s guitar sounds positively like shoegazing here.

Elsewhere, the rev-it-up “Ride The Wild Wind” suggests an
art-rock modification of, of all things, the Smiths’ “Shakespeare’s Sister”
while Mercury clearly enjoys himself immensely on “Delilah,” which turns out to
be a song about his cat.

Not that there aren’t more solemn moments. The title song –
number one as a single, but hardly played today – is an obvious attempt to do a
“Bo Rhap 2,” but is an altogether knottier and more complex affair, taking in
parade ground paradiddles, bits of “Bolero” and “Kashmir,” a flamenco interlude
with guest guitarist Steve Howe, and an atomic explosion at the end. It sounds
like a statement of intent, not so much what is to come for its singer, but
more reminding us what Queen were about in the first place. There are no easy “nothing
really matters”-type hooks and the song’s agitated angst looks ahead to future
labelmates Radiohead, and specifically “Paranoid Android.”

Likewise, the closing two songs are where the band turn
their attention on what is on the horizon. “Bijou” is just one verse of
Mercury, sung as though he is already beyond this planet or our reach, bookended
by two long and pained weeping guitar soliloquies by May. Finally, with “The
Show Must Go On,” Mercury reinforces his determination to keep on going as long
as he can do so, and to keep his public countenance at whatever cost. From a
dying man, the emotions expressed here are commendably lacking in self-pity.

But perhaps the best song is “Those Are The Days,” written
by Roger Taylor and one of the simplest and most moving songs Queen ever
recorded. A bluffer “Being Boring,” the song’s easy sun finds Mercury musing on
his excitable past but finally opting not to live there; the key couplet is “No
use in sitting and thinking on what you did/When you can lay back and enjoy it
through your kids.” The cycle of life continues, endless and imperturbable, but
of course its air of contented achievement remains essentially tragic because
of its author and singer, who could have no children and was fully aware that
his own time was rapidly running out. And yet, the final impression is one of
uplifting hope (it’s very nearly Mercury’s “All Apologies”) – in the last shot
of the video (which was the last time all four members of Queen worked actively
together as a group), as with the last, dying moment of the song, Mercury
glances up, smiling at the camera – a real smile - and whispers, “I still love
you.” And then he is no more, yet all around us.

(Author’s Note: Some editions include an extra track, “Are You
Satisfied?” Mine, sourced from the charity shop for 50p, does not.)

Start a fire in pop and pretty soon the corporate ambulance
chasers will get to the scene. There were Happy Mondays and Pop Will Eat
Itself, but the multinationals wanted you to dig EMF and Jesus Jones. In the
States these two bands were even marketed as representing “the Manchester scene,”
despite EMF actually coming from the Forest of Dean and Jesus Jones being the
biggest pop stars since Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich to come from
Wiltshire (they were based in Bradford-on-Avon but its members came from places
as far apart as Carshalton, Devizes and Kentish Town).

If only JJ had an ounce of the genuine weirdness of
DDBM&T. People raved, and in some places still do, about Liquidizer as epitomising a pioneering
fusion of indie and dance, but all I hear in it is PWEI without the wit,
adventure and uncleared samples (the record is suspiciously clear of any recognisable samples).

No doubt someone at EMI had a quiet word with them about
making their second album more “accessible,” i.e. more guitar-based songs. It
is fairly evident on listening that Jesus Jones were really a rather
conservative – and you may wish to capitalise that last word – rock band with pretences
to radicalism. It doesn’t help that Mike Edwards possesses one of the most
singularly unattractive voices in pop, generally sounding like he had taken too
much Listerine mouthwash and is about to be sick. Moreover, on songs like “Trust
Me,” he even manages to conjure up the unlikely comparison of Roger Daltrey.

For all their chatter about newness and nowness…and few
things date more rapidly in pop…it’s clear that Jesus Jones cannot escape the
urge to sound like mediocre sixties freakbeat, minus the freaky elements. Even
when they go for the all-out noise assault (“Stripped”) we spent the duration
of the track naming acts we believed did or do this sort of thing better. We
passed the fifty mark.

At least “Right Here, Right Now” is a song about something – the Berlin Wall coming down;
oh, all that squandered hope – and consequently is their only song much known
outside Britain, so much so that the band still regularly reforms to play
corporate events – just the one song – and get richly paid. In Canada, however,
it is perhaps most famous for being used in a television advertising campaign
to attract tourists to Prince Edward Island, a place, Lena reliably informs me,
famous only for Anne Of Green Gables
and potatoes.

I am sure that many young conservatives of the period
revelled in the alleged wonders of “Right Here, Right Now” as a beacon for the
future they wanted. But I still find Doubt
a dispiriting, enervating listen – and of the four hundred and twenty-one
albums we have looked at so far, its cover ranks with that of entry #71 as the
worst album cover in the series to date. You do wonder what “big Dave Balfe”
and the other people at Food Records were thinking – hey, we’ve hit the big
time with Jesus Jones, which is just as well; who the hell is going to listen
to a band called Blur? Finally, Doubt
reinforces the maxim that putting warnings on the sleeves of albums stating “This
album contains extreme sounds which could damage musical equipment when played
at high volume” is the crying of rock wolf.

Monday, 19 December 2016

Track listing: Island
Of Souls/All This Time/Mad About You/Jeremiah Blues (Part 1)/Why Should I Cry
For You/Saint Agnes And The Burning Train/The Wild Wild Sea/The Soul Cages/When
The Angels Fall

In 1974 Alan Price released the album Between Today And Yesterday, which was divided halfway between songs looking
back at growing up in and around Newcastle and
reflections on what it meant to be a Geordie in seventies Britain.
Stylistically the “yesterday” songs owe much to music hall and pre-war Palais
dance bands, while the “today” songs veer towards jazz and blues but are still
squarely in the mid-seventies. Watching over both is the spirit of Randy Newman
– the album could almost be Price’s Good Old Boys and at times the songs’
outward merriment cunningly disguises their inner bleakness: “I’m asking you to
give us time,” announces Price at the beginning of “Left Over People,” “And
listen to this tale/With particular rrrr-regard (he rolls his “r”s as angrily
as Lydon would do a couple of years later)/For folks whose lives are for sale.”

Probably the record’s most famous piece is “Jarrow Song,” a superficially
jaunty top ten single which more or less calls for armed insurrection. Price
finally finds himself marooned by the present, realising that in forty years
nothing has changed with no lessons learned. The title song, which ends the
record, is as quietly apocalyptic album-closer as Newman’s “God’s Song (That’s
Why I Love Mankind).” “Between today and yesterday is like a million years,”
Price sings, gloomily, “And the only truthful man he’s seen was standing there
in tears.” He ends the song, and the record, with a terrible gesture of tactful
finality: “Enough – I said enough – just
draw the shades/Please let me drink black wine.”

The record’s resonance in 2016 cannot be over-emphasised, of
course, but a great part of why it works is because it’s so selfless and knows
its own limitations; there is no attempt at a storyline to link any “concept,”
and Price’s band are all reliables (Colin Green, Dave Markee, Clive Thacker,
with Derek Wadsworth doing the horn and string arrangements) who remain at the
service of the music and do not ramble.

It is a record which almost certainly would have been heard
and absorbed by the younger Sting. But The
Soul Cages proves he learned no lessons from it. Instead of economy, there
is endless noodling – a particular offender is guitarist Dominic Miller, who
reels off every page of the Ladybird
Bumper Book of Rock Guitar Clichés available to him – and the concept,
while obviously heartfelt (as far as paternal-related grief in rock goes, it’s
preferable to “The Living Years”), is so ponderously and ineptly realised that
all you hear finally is the sound of money being spent on the part of a group
of people who imagine it is still the eighties. The presence of Hugh Padgham as
co-producer was nigh inevitable.

For all Sting’s talk of proud Newcastle and the Tyne and big
ships – the story gets rather silly towards record’s end with the sub-Moby Dick fantasia/shaggy dog tale of the
title song – we are not really allowed to forget that this was an album
recorded in expensive studios in Paris and Italy. Even the instrumental “Saint
Agnes” is a flimsy affair which might as well soundtrack a daytime television
programme about instructional macramé
in Budapest.
Throughout he is at pains to retain his “King Of Pain” status – an alternative
title for many of his albums could be It’s
All About You, Sting, Isn’t It? – and the expensive musicians at his disposal
do their best to make the music interesting (particularly Branford Marsalis and
Kenny Kirkland in the “free” interludes of “Jeremiah Blues”). The closing “When
The Angels Fall,” in which Sting takes nearly eight very long minutes to make
his mind up about mourning the past or deciding that the North will rise again,
highlights the record’s central problem, in that it is the audio equivalent of
those travelogues you get on television, hosted by once dangerous people, or
people who acted dangerous, but have since been ironed out to docile compliance
– Michael Palin, Billy Connolly, Adrian Edmondson and so forth. Or this could
simply be a very long prototype for Who
Do You Think You Are?

Either way, as a representation of where someone from the North-East
stands in relation to the world in which they find themselves, it falls a very
long way behind Alan Price, and certainly Paddy McAloon – I wonder if Sting
ever had it in him to create a song as simultaneously ambiguous and
heartrending as “Nightingales.” But then McAloon is a genius who has never made
a bad record, whereas Sting fatally thinks
he’s a genius. He’s a would-be Renaissance man who once upon a time would have
been lucky to have been a roadie for Renaissance. Perhaps the most telling
comment on The Soul Cages comes from drummer
Manu Katché, who bravely tries throughout most of the record’s forty-eight
interminable minutes to render the music into something resembling compelling –
at the end of a seemingly unending fadeout to “When The Angels Fall,” he brings
proceedings to a close by a loud and meaningful drum tattoo, as if to say “Sting,
shut the fuck up.” If only someone other than Stewart Copeland had said that to
him before.

Thursday, 15 December 2016

Track listing: The
Voice Of Enigma/Principles Of Lust: a) Sadeness; b) Find Love; (c) Sadeness
(Reprise)/Callas Went Away/Mea Culpa/The Voice And The Snake/Knocking On
Forbidden Doors/Back To The Rivers Of Belief: a) Way To Eternity; (b)
Hallelujah; (c) The Rivers Of Belief

(Author’s Note: I used the November 1991 “Limited Edition” which
includes four extra remixes – “Sadeness (Meditation),” “Mea Culpa (Fading
Shades),” “Principles Of Lust (Everlasting Lust)” and “The Rivers Of Belief
(The Returning Silence.” These are segued from the end of the original album so
cannot be avoided or skipped over. Don’t you just love “deluxe” editions?)

One question I sometimes get asked by correspondents is: why
not write a book on how to listen to music? I don’t know whether such a thing
is possible. There is a compilation of old writing for newspapers and music
magazines which impertinently calls itself Ways
Of Seeing but is anything but. Furthermore, there is a digest from the 33⅓
people optimistically or pompously subtitled How To Listen To Music.

Listening to music – as opposed to hearing it – is actually
one of the most difficult tasks there is, probably because only one of our five
senses, that of hearing, is required to engage in it. As Derek Bailey
rhetorically asked Ben Watson in the late nineties, what do people do when
they’re listening to a record (as opposed to watching a musician perform live,
with its own quantity of distractions, including ones which may involve all five
senses) – read a book? Make a cup of tea? In that case, all you have is
wallpaper.

Instructing, or guiding, people on how to listen to music is
also fraught with difficulties because music is not cinema or television, where
at least two senses are required, and that of vision is always the primary one.
Hence it is quite easy to write manuals like David Thomson’s How To Watch A Movie if you know your
stuff, since, as Thomson points out, the attentive film viewer has to spend
quite a lot of time looking at people looking at other people (this is also
true, to a lesser extent, with live theatre).

But how to indicate that when listening to music, you should
be listening to people listening to other people? It certainly isn’t
impossible. Jazz, for instance, is primarily constructed of people listening
and reacting to other people – and, if you’re a careful listener, so are such
musics as folk, devotional raga and gospel. But that is one of the reasons why
in the end I think jazz the best form of music, namely that it is a true
people’s music insofar as you are witnessing something being constructed from a
very basic foundation and put together in such a way that it becomes its own
ekphrasis. When you listen to a piece of improvised jazz music, you are listening
to people listening to each other. You are listening to a society forming
itself, to suggest a way in which humanity might better coexist.

There are other theories, of course. Fear Of Music (Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen) by
David Stubbs is a fascinating book which, when not serving as a whistle-stop
tour of/rough guide to subversive art and music throughout the twentieth
century, tries to find answers to the question of why people can generally
assimilate modern art but seem to have insurmountable difficulties with modern
music. Stubbs comes up with a number of possible explanations, including the
“Original” theory, the thrill engendered by owning something unique and
non-reproducible; but my kneejerk response to the question would be that, for
better or worse, humans respond far more quickly and readily to visual than
aural stimuli. It’s the way we’re programmed and extends into all areas of life.
Always it comes down to what somebody or something looks like. Furthermore,
painting, cinema and theatre demand sensory engagement – the visual focus is
far more overpowering than the aural one. We can’t walk away from a film – but
we can vacate the room if a piece of music annoys us. Even when it comes down
to the business of music “appreciation” the visuals are of primary importance;
look at your music collection and see how it is organised, how careful the
colours of the sleeves you chose, consciously or subconsciously. I myself have
not admitted several very worthwhile records into the house on the grounds of
their atrocious cover design.

None of this, however, gets us any closer to a notion of how
to listen to music (never mind “why listen to music?”). Perhaps we were better
off in the days when records came with a simple cover photograph or design,
track listing and (occasionally) credits. When we didn’t know – indeed, were
not expected to know – the history of a record or the person or people who
recorded it. One had to create one’s own mythology out of what one heard, find
one’s own interpretation. My CD copy of the “Limited Edition” of the first
Enigma album certainly carries little other than that – the Play School Caspar David Friedrich of Johann
Zambrysk’s cover drawing, three distended quotes (one of which may have been
made up) and no credits whatsoever.

Therefore, if my intention were to make sense out of this
strange record, I would have little to go on apart from outside research. I
would have to trust my own ears and my own experience, and listen to the music.
But it’s easier said than done. So much of what surrounds the act of listening
to music succeeds in shrouding or otherwise obscuring the act. We come to a
piece of music with prejudices and preconceptions which we cannot unlearn or
untrain ourselves not to have.

A case in my point are the Eagles (yes, I know they are
strictly speaking called just “Eagles” but I suspect nobody omits the indefinite article now). For decades I couldn’t
get them, having been endlessly bombarded by four or five of their songs on
oldies radio during those same decades, which do distort the full picture of
what the group had to offer. Hence it was with some surprise that I learned of
“Journey Of The Sorcerer.”

It appears at the end of the first side of the group’s 1975
album One Of These Nights, much of
which still sounds to me like a careful gallimaufry of half-decent songs and
ideas buried beneath an avalanche of green triangular Quality Street chocolates. “Sorcerer” was
composed by Bernie Leadon, who had joined the Eagles from the Flying Burrito
Brothers – he is the umbilical link between the two, and would angrily quit the
group before 1975 was out – and is a long and patient instrumental with three
clear peaks, none of which is exactly identical and all of which are reached by
different routes. Essentially a concerto for prepared banjo and string
ensemble, very much harking back at psychedelia, “Sorcerer” is a rueful wave of
farewell to any elements of country or bluegrass in the Eagles’ music, and its
coda, featuring the fiddles of David Bromberg, is testament to this box being
closed forever.

Whichever way the music reaches those peaks, however, the
peaks become immediately familiar once they come into view for they form
something very familiar indeed to people of a certain age – the music was used
as the theme to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To
The Galaxy and continues to strike me as the band’s most coherent and
affecting statement, perhaps doubly so when you consider that it bears no
words.

Indeed, listening to the steady build-up of notes, effects
and instruments, with Jim Ed Norman and the Royal Martian Orchestra sweeping
into sight like a grand, benign mountain range eroding doubt, sixties and
seventies finding a common cause and language, I don’t just wonder how well
this would have fitted into SMiLE,
but also think: isn’t this the Great
Cosmic American Music that Gram Parsons once promised in its fullest
realisation?

But Leadon left and was replaced by Joe Walsh, and the band
proceeded towards a bombastic rock dead-end (Hotel California is Steely Dan if they had stuck to watching The Beverly Hillbillies). Nevertheless,
this “Sorcerer” compelled me, even if only for a shade under seven minutes, to
reconfigure their art in my mind and to do so by listening.

To this end I have attempted to give MCMXC a.D. a fair hearing. In truth I would hitherto have
considered the record fortunate to have been given one paragraph of TPL. However, I was encouraged to give
complacency the body swerve by what Mark Sinker wrote about the record on Freaky Trigger. As with all music
writers worthy of the name, Mark made me think about the album anew, forced me
to come to terms with my own prejudices. Hence this piece.

And hence also, perhaps, one of the many reasons why I was
unimpressed with the record at first listen over a quarter of a century ago.
Did Michael Cretu really think nobody in 1991 would have bought, let alone
heard, track two, side one, of the 1976 album Paschale Mysterium by Capella Antiqua München (conducted by Konrad
Ruhland)? I myself had bought a copy many years beforehand to give my then
nascent assemblage of records a touch of the “exotic” – every student did that,
and if it wasn’t Gregorian chanting it was the songs of the humpbacked sperm
whale or Hildegard of Bingen – and so when I heard “Sadeness” (prissily
re-spelt “Sadness” for the buttoned-up British market) I shrugged my shoulders
and turned my attention elsewhere. The sacred and the secular; the chaste and
the proscribed, two sides of the same coin, etc.; I’d been there (musically and
artistically) before.

This is what I originally wrote on Popular about “Sadeness Part
1 (everything starts with an ‘e’)”:

The irony to note here is that New Age muzak, and other New
Age paraphernalia, are principally, if not exclusively, consumed by the kind of
person for whom spare time is an ample luxury, namely, amply rich people. Those
who really need stress relief tend to find it in other, more destructive ways.
“Sadness” indicates the benign, vacant tabula rasa which would become, in
spurious and gratuitous misreading of the KLF, “chillout” music, the equivalent
of an ice cube being gently lowered into a less pink Martini. Enigma was
Romanian synth musician Michael Cretu, who had been around since the seventies,
and “Sadeness” sets it all up – the soon-to-be-obligatory Gregorian chants and
whalesong, the polite Soul II Soul beat (though who would dance to it?), the prettiness
which could only arise from a profound misunderstanding of “Moments In Love,”
and a modest attempt to “subvert” expectations as a Dire Straits guitar revs
up, synthesiser chords pile up in a “threatening” manager and a Stars In Your Eyes Gainsbourg wannabe (N.B.:
Cretu says only that this was “a good friend” but he does sound like Cretu
himself, or, ahem, “Curly MC”) mumbles “Sade, dit moi…pourquoi le sang pour le
plaisir…le plaisir sans l’amour?…/Sade, es-tu diabolique ou divin?”
“Sade-ness,” you see – and the triple deep breaths which the female singer
takes immediately after that question answer it…this is shag pile music
masquerading as enlightenment, and about as enigmatic as Ernest Saves Christmas.

Full marks to Mark, however, for having a deeper go at the perhaps
not very enigmatic Enigma. What about his proposal that 1991 marked “THE YEAR
OF THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED” – you could certainly categorise 2016 as such,
and by no means in a good way; if any lesson has been taught to us over the
last quarter-century, it is that it would be best for humanity if a lot of
things were repressed - ?

The problem with this theory from the perspective of the
album charts is that the latter more often than not seem to be the default
domain of the otherwise “repressed.” Most, if not all, of the acts Mark mentions
as returning to the top in 1991 as though from forced exile were actually TPL regulars in the eighties and in some
cases even the seventies. But the fabric of the market differed from even two
years before. For the several mega-acts who survived and prospered despite the
earthquakes which rumbled beneath them, they were to find that the nineties
weren’t quite the playground that the eighties had been for them. Now they had
a reduced share of the market, had to plead their case in steadily more
confining spaces.

But Michael Cretu had returned from the late seventies,
where he had been a bit player in TPL
– we’ll get back to them in this
piece soon enough – and a lot of what Mark says about the resurgence of what he
calls “Eurotica” is, I can vouch, absolutely true, including – or especially
including – the best bits, such as Aphrodite’s Child’s 666, which is sampled at several key stages throughout this album,
including on “Sadeness” and the Book of Revelations/end of the world stuff in the
“Rivers Of Belief” section. By the mid-seventies these roads had diverged but
it’s probable that Vangelis’ Heaven And
Hell LP and Demis’ The Roussos
Phenomenon E.P. were used for not dissimilar purposes. Nonetheless, the use
of Irene Papas’ expectant voice on “Sadeness” – in its original setting (the
track “∞”) she intones the refrain “I was, I am, I am to come” and everything
is as spelled out as, though far more thrillingly than, the average Judge Dread
single of the period.

One might say that such as veteran entertainers and
legitimate actors were compelled in seventies Britain to appear in sub-Carry On pornographic movies in order to
make a living, there was no way forward for “progressive” musicians once the
dream was over except by making the apposite soundtracks. But the lines in progrotica
(as I messily call it) are less defined; listening to some of the period’s more
fanciful, less elusive music, one does feel that the musicians want to get a
leg over the universe as well as surf it.

To the album itself, then. It begins with a Charlotte
Rampling impersonator – actually one Louisa Stanley, then an executive at Cretu’s
label, Virgin Records* -

*and isn’t this actually spelling it out, from the totally
not ambiguous original label design inwards? Like, we did Tubular Bells a generation ago – and indeed TPL is not finished with that
– when we were “all” eating cold baked beans straight from the tin in unheated
squats in Notting Hill…

…but now, when all these people have prospered, in great
part because they saw the Thatcher wagon coming at the end of that decade and
thought it was THE SAME THING as Branson – as, indeed, did Branson (in 1973 he
would never have entertained the tacky and seemingly numberless photoshoots of
later times) – the gaily-coloured NEW
THING coming to change and shake up dusty old toffs (people are still being
fooled by that in 2016) – who jumped on the self-loving eighties and exclaimed
THIS IS ME!, who were smart or poor enough to buy houses or flats cheap in
areas which would in the future become desirable, who are now rich and secure
in newly-gated “communities” which they would have found unaffordable a
generation before, and from which the generation following them would be priced
out altogether – well, for you SAME people, here’s a Tubular Bells for the NINETIES! All smoothed out, all the
disagreeable discrepancies ironed away…no barrow-spilling Windo discordant reed
honks to derail you**

**(and it is notable that Gary Windo himself passed away in
1992, younger than I am now, of an asthma attack. It was as if the world had
told him they didn’t want him any more.)

- and, as Mark says, this sounds like the introduction to a
yoga tape, or perhaps something more sinister. “Good evening. This is the Voice
of Enigma.” You almost expect her to be intoning “This is an Emergency
Broadcast from the BBC. Confirmation of a nuclear attack on this country has
been received…” “In the next hour,” the voice goes on, “we will take you with
us into another world…”

“This is a promise. For the next hour, everything you hear
from us is really true and based on solid fact.”

(Orson Welles, F For
Fake, 1973)

The voice does its best to hypnotise us – “Start to move
slowly…VERY slowly…” – and then we are into “The Principles Of Lust,”
incorporating The Hit. As for the alleged “panpipes” – which I initially thought
might have been sampled whalesong –they actually turn out to be sampled shakuhachi
flutes, the Japanese instrument which evolved from the Chinese bamboo flute of
the sixth century, popular with the Fuke sect (yes, I know) of Buddhist monks,
who used them not so much as musical instruments but as meditational tools.
This section also includes stock breakbeats, noises from wildlife and the
aforementioned hot apocalypse action of Irene Papas’ deep breathing.

Prog-Fusion would be a good means of categorising this
music. Like that damnable genre, it turns out to be all promise and no
deliverance, all expectations and no fulfilment. The tropes are set up – and nothing
is done with them, in order not to upset the newly rich neighbours. I imagine
Malcolm McLaren must have smiled at “Callas Went Away” and at how much better
he’d done this sort of thing (and
helped popularise vogueing!) on Waltz
Darling in 1989, an enterprise involving Actual Musicians who were Around
At The Time Of That Prog Dawn (Jeff Beck, Bootsy Collins, even David A
Stewart). Here we hear the great Maria singing what sounds like something from
Massenet’s opera Werther – the aria “Ces
Lettres! Ces Lettres!” to be specific, while German pop star (and Mrs Cretu)
Sandra indulges in more deep breathing. The conflict between what is deemed right
to want and what is forbidden, perhaps? But it goes nowhere – the keyboards do
not sing, there is no reaction, no listening (thus the notion that this is the
first “major” album to be based around samples alone. But on something like DJ
Shadow’s Endtroducing you are given
the notion that everybody is
listening, or at least Josh Davis is listening to everybody).

It goes on. If the rainstorm at the beginning of “Mea Culpa”
sounds familiar, it’s because it has been sampled from the opening of the song “Black
Sabbath” by Black Sabbath – but, crucially, stripped of its shock, otherness
and, yes, punctum, as though the
seventies were a crime for which we must all pay in one or another way (the
final nail in that socioaesthetic coffin is not the passing of Greg Lake – if
only Cretu were able to improvise, to genuinely create [note the rhetorically-justified split infinitive], then he
might understand a bit of what Tarkus strove to be about, which was the oddly logical juxtaposition of apocalypse and
comedy; hence it is entirely fitting that ELP should wind up writing songs for
Jim Davidson pantomimes, and if only poor Keith Emerson had better understood the
ramifications of his own juxtaposition he might have been persuaded to stick
around – but Kelly Osbourne asking the gay community to give Trump a chance.
That, more so than an overpriced repressing [omission of hyphen intentional] of
Never Mind The Bollocks crowding up
the window of a discount gift shop/chainstore on the King’s Road, is the
terminal cementing of Deadhead sticker onto Cadillac bumper). Instead of Iommi’s
crashing chords and Ward’s stumbling-out-of-the-apocalypse drumming – or even
the threatening bells – we get “Kyrie Eleison” and flutes.

The best track is “The Voice And The Snake,” 99 agreeable
seconds of dislocated non-tonality and non-rhythm; or, as I better know it, “Seven
Bowls” by Aphrodite’s Child. The breaking bowl leads to “Knocking On Forbidden
Doors” but instead of Peter Wyngarde making sick jokes in a variety of comedy
foreign accents, we are encountered with…yet more Gregorian chanting; “Salve
Regina,” without any acknowledgement of the crying children of Eve, mourning
and weeping in this land of exile.

Finally we get back to “Back To The Rivers Of Belief” and
catharsis comes apparently in the guise of…the Close Encounters theme, said in some quarters to have been inspired
by the philosophy (such as it was) of Sun Ra. But you will search in vain here
for a Marshall Allen or John Gilmore to blow the complacent temple down. As
with Escalator Over The Hill, earlier
themes and motifs return for a final bow, though to underwhelming effect. Instead
of the genuine catharsis of a Jack Bruce, we get a dreadful Renta-RockVoice
hack blurting out clichés with some even more dreadful Rock Guitar. Then the
inevitable Revelations stuff about the seventh seal and so forth (yet again sampled
from Aphrodite’s Child, I’m afraid) – and what, as the music blandly dies in
our underfed ears, have we learned? Without the remixes the record does not
even last an hour, nor do we hear the returning Louisa Stanley, like the voice
of Lowell Thomas surging through the finale of This Is Cinerama, telling us to switch off and hoping that we have
enjoyed our “journey.”

“I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the
truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past seventeen
minutes, I've been lying my head off.”

(Welles, op. cit.)

The project appears to have been one where, quite apart from
confirming everybody as equals, all art has been confirmed as constituting
elements of the same beige broth.

The sleeve of the album contains three quotes; one from
Freud, another from one “Father X, Exorcist, Church of Notre Dame, Paris” (who
I’m not convinced actually exists) – and a misquote from Blake, demonstrating
how little Cretu has understood (if he has even read) The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell.

But perhaps in the sampled elisions of 1991 music, there are
more intriguing roads for Blakeisms to travel. That thing Mark said about “cheeky
sonic pseudo-magick” for example.

Love’s Secret Domain
appeared a little later in 1991 than Enigma, and to – at the time – little or
no notice, the mainstream music press already busying itself with prioritising a
refreshing return to basic, raw, honest, indie guitar rock. Its reputation
steadily grew in time, however, long after it had vanished from disinterested
record racks, and although it remains available as a download from Coil’s
website, the CD or cassette editions now command prices liable to cause your
bank manager to shudder. I don’t know where all these people were when dozens
of copies, priced at £1.99 each, were sitting in the cheapo section of
Selectadisc in Berwick Street for the best part of a year but there you go (the
only time I have ever seen it in a second-hand record store was in Toronto in
2007, where it was retailing for a mere forty dollars).

Anyway, the initial obligatory shrug of “another Coil album,
yawn” should be overcome because the record – its acronym should be obvious –
is a lot of things that the Enigma album isn’t; celebratory, humorous,
striking, provocative, consciousness-preserving, adventurous and at times very
affecting. It begins with a slow stutter of backwards effects, like a dormant
stomach reluctantly coming to life, before moving into an aural speed-read of
quickfire untraceable samples and functional jazz/New Jack Swing-lite beats
(“Disco Hospital”) before leading, via rocket launch noises and post-Tin Drum ritual gongs, into the first
“Teenage Lightning,” actually the first of three different readings on the
album of the same basic piece. This version is elementally the most basic of
the three – you do get the feeling of a younger and happier Joe Meek in the
Holloway Road knocking this up out of sheer Gloucester chutzpah – although I also note the extremely familiar bassline,
from Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father” (via “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”),
a piece of music inspired by a trip made by its author to Brazil. Later on in
the record, the second version (“Teenage Lightning 2”) is perhaps the most “complete”
of the three, while the third (“Lorca Not Orca”) adds some Ibiza-friendly
flamenco guitar- that reading represents a crawl out of the tunnel of
suppression into bright freedom, all the more cherished for having been
harder-earned.

It is probably reasonable to note that, although the album
was systematically praised at and after the time for coming to terms with Acid
House, the two core members of Coil had a keener ear on dance music trends of
the time, and in many ways help anticipate some here, most noticeably in “The
Snow” – like Enigma, it uses Gregorian chants, but unlike Enigma it has purpose
and punctum. Some familiar-sounding piano work comes from Mike McEvoy – who once
appeared on Scritti Politti’s Songs To
Remember – which is a major relief following Cretu’s
minimalist-to-the-point-of-inertia piano “work” (Much of the Enigma album
suggests what Serge Gainsbourg, who died a couple of months after it came out,
might have sounded like minus all the Serge Gainsbourg elements).

Better still is the majestically patient “Dark River”
which three-dimensionalises ambient music to the point where it becomes its own
omnipotent, but living, statue or monument. Like Whistler’s Chelsea riverscapes
there are differing but related details in the far distance, in the
middleground and close up, and all are captivating and transcendent. As with
later masterpieces from its decade such as Aphex Twin’s “Stone In Focus” and μ-zik’s
“sick porter,” it transfixes its listener with modest imposition, and could be
as old and timeless as the song of the gods.

Other highlights include “Titan Arch” which guest singer
Marc Almond holds together through sheer strength of character as the music
collapses loudly around him (“Under shivering stars/The sickness is gliding” –
it was probably the most avant-garde Almond had been since Psychic TV’s “Guiltless”;
Peter Christopherson evidently understood him the way so many other musicians
and producers didn’t). “Windowpane,” sung by Jhon Balance himself, suggests the
Moody Blues outlook escorted towards a further dimension (“If you want to touch
the sky/Just put a window in your eye”), but his mainly
monotone-with-brushes-of-exclamatory-revelation vocal style actually points a
finger directly to what Karl Hyde would be getting up to with Underworld just a
couple of years later. “Chaostrophy,” despite its terrible title, is an
absorbing passage from slowly-decaying elements of what might once have been
described as “music” to a peaceful, oboe-led pastorale, as though the light had
finally been reached and attained.

But even this music is not free of its own clichés. Little
Annie (a.k.a. Annie Anxiety Bandez./etc. – her 1987 Adrian Sherwood-produced
album Jackamo, currently available as
credited to “Little Annie,” is ridiculously yet merrily ahead of its Björk/Goldfrapp
time) turns up for “Things Happen” and has a nice time in the standard Grace
Jones/Marianne Faithfull role of the woman of vague European origin caught in
an exodus, or a riot, or is it just her backyard, last helicopter out of the
embassy etc. (despite somebody – Balance? – uttering a desperate cry of “Kill
the Creator! Send them the Bomb!” right at the beginning) chit-chatting
semi-drunkenly with an old friend in Ohio
(not Scott Walker or Chrissie Hynde) but there is definitely a 1983
heard-this-all-before feel about the piece. “Where Even The Darkness Is
Something To See” is three or so minutes of pointless didgeridoo ambience (and
not a patch on Aphex Twin’s “Digeridoo”). The listener’s ears strain to
identify the dialogue at the beginning of “Further Back And Faster” but sadly
it turns out to be from that old Video
City indie standby Performance, and once we get to the HATE
and LOVE tattoos on the knuckles it is definitely Saturday all-nighter at the
Scala time.

Mr Balance brings the proceedings to an end with the title
song. He cites Blake again (“O Rose thou art sick” although we get an agonised “URGH!”
from the vocalist rather than invisible worms flying in the night) as well as,
very predictably, Orbison’s “In Dreams” (not scary). It’s quite enjoyable in a
tittering-to-onself way but overall, I would say, ends the record rather
flatly. There has to be another solution.

Beyond its cover – and the subtextual notion that, with at
least some Pink Floyd, musicians in the nineties were knocking on
still-forbidden doors – Chill Out
doesn’t really have much to do with entry #83, even though it appeared in the
context of a similar period for music and art, one that KLF biographer John
Higgs has termed the “liminal” period, where nothing and nobody really is in
charge or setting the pace, and hence where anything and anybody can really
happen and have some degree of an impact.

For the KLF this was the interregnum
between Acid House and Britpop – a point at which some claimed proof that
evolution was reversible – and the fact that throughout the early nineties, and
during the year 1991 in particular, they were in commercial dominance. The moot
point, they might have observed, is whether things were so up in the air that a
couple of merry art chancers like Drummond and Cauty could be permitted to have
their way.

Yet Chill Out –
the KLF’s first non-compilation album under that name – can’t squarely be
placed in any tidy “tapestry” or “canon” of pop or rock or even dance music
history. In an interview at the time, Drummond explained that the purpose of
the record was to act as a soundtrack to the
day after a rave – when everyone and everything had packed up and gone and
all that was left was the countryside. Remember what I said about Our Favourite Shop being music for the
day after defeat – and let us not even think of the 1983 American telefilm
drama The Day After, starring Jason
Robards – and consider that these forty-four minutes of music might signify the
day after a victory (albeit possibly a temporary, pyrrhic one).

There isn’t much to Chill
Out, and yet there is everything to it – enough, at least, to convince me
that this music avoids the traps in which both Enigma and Coil encase
themselves. Superficially, it is the aural soundtrack to a journey, one made
across the Deep South of the USA, specifically along the Gulf Coast – but, as
Drummond later admitted, he and Cauty had never been anywhere near Louisiana or
the Tex-Mex border (at the time) and the names and descriptions were picked
randomly from an atlas, the whole being allegedly recorded in two days on
anything that wasn’t nailed down in the basement of Cauty’s squat in Stockwell.

However, as Dolphy once astutely noted, once the notes are
in the air, released, they are for us to breathe, and this Chill Out still seems to me to answer a lot of questions about ways
of hearing which both Enigma and Coil avoid (intentionally and unintentionally,
in that order and in my opinion). On the face of it, nothing much happens
during the record; we hear the sounds of the outdoors, trains whistling by,
automobile engines on the road, the distant noises of nature, the transient random
noise bursts – or, to put it more precisely, drifts, like the continental drift
– with announcements. Songs and radio broadcasts loom, shift into momentary focus
and disperse into space.

From the point of view of an American journey, and given the
multiple voices and references to other songs within its structure, Chill Out may even be compared with
Brian Wilson’s SMiLE insofar as this
may be the soundtrack to the journey of the electronic bicycle rider. There are
long and languid passages of pedal steel, courtesy of “Evil” Graham Lee of the
great Perth
band The Triffids – and consider what we heard on the very first song on their
album The Black Swan from the
previous year:

“And from this window, I can see the street below

I can hear the hit parade on the radio

There's dirty dishes piling up in the sink

But it's too hot to move, and it's too hot to think.”

A similar feeling pervades Chill Out. Not until we reach the second half does anything
approximating a beat appear, and then only relatively momentarily. There are
separate reasons for that. But all is not as it might seem. On the radio we
hear a growling man yelling to someone unspecified about the kingdom of God and
money (“You have so much money, you’re gonna get scared”). There is a news
report of a fatal and bloody drag racing accident (“His body was pulled from
the car by a passing motorist after which the car, in flames…destroying stores...”
– it sounds like the last broadcast). We get a Bible quote (“Be of good courage
and be of good comfort,” inevitably making me think of Welles’ “Be of good
heart, cry the dead artists out of the living past” in F For Fake), a DJ voiceover and that growling man again, who now
reveals himself to be a rather ominous-sounding preacher (“Bronx New York! Get
on the telephone! Call 50 of your friends! Tell all your friends who need some
help! Doctor Williams comin' to the Bronx New York…I’m talkin’ to you, baby, I’m
talkin’ to you, sucker…”). We also
hear broadcasts from Russia
and Britain.

Another layer of Chill
Out is disclosed with some hindsight. At the time of its release in
February 1990, the KLF had had no hit singles - if you discount “Doctorin’ The
Tardis” – but the music here subtly signals to us what is to come. There are
references to, amongst others, “3 A.M. Eternal” – the bathysphere bleep becomes
a moving siren to lost drifters everywhere – “Last Train To Trancentral” and “Justified
And Ancient.” It is a disguised greatest hits compilation before the hits had even happened or existed. Had anybody done this
with pop before?

There are recurring electronic motifs, but also…the sound of
pop music, the aura that it gifted on those listening in prefabricated post-war
bedrooms, or tuning into pirate stations on their Walkmen. In many ways, Chill Out commemorates lost pop, and maybe some of its
umbilical ties to what became progressive rock – there are Peter Green’s
Fleetwood Mac, playing “Albatross,” that unassuming Santo and Johnny in Chess
Studios tribute that needed so words and whose tom-toms sounded like the
biggest possible heartbeat, which the Shadows wished they’d thought of first –
they split not long after the record came out – which went to number one
towards the end of a decade where everybody was beginning to feel lost, whether
the crippled, dying Vietnam vet of “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town” or the plaintive,
self-sacrificing father of “The Deal.”

In that latter chart – almost the last of the sixties – we also
find “Oh Well” by Fleetwood Mac. A year after “Albatross” and Peter Green is
clearly troubled. But the elements which turn up on Chill Out are those of the seldom-played “Part II” – the slow,
patient guitar adagio with eventual
Morricone-type orchestrations, from the album which helped give Then Play Long its name. As with some of
Derek Raymond’s protagonists, one gets the feeling that Green is approaching
his willed burnout, his end (and yet, at the time of writing, everybody
involved in that record is still alive and well!).

But the aura here is increasingly troublesome. Also from
1969 we hear, in the distance, Elvis with “In The Ghetto,” and I am back in my
orange sunlit bedroom, lying on my bed and listening to Fluff Freeman counting
down that week’s charts, absorbing what is going on and attempting to make some
kind of sense out of it before dinner is ready. The lost Elvis, or the Elvis
who temporarily found himself before becoming lost again, singing a song of
loss, about losing even by being born (Bobby Womack plays the guitar) – the lost
past, coming back into focus. Other interjections, such as the repeated “After
the love has gone,” come from a Boy George record (“After The Love” by Jesus
Loves You), remind us that somewhere it is turning into the nineties.

There, however, unmistakeably coming into view, the source
of all the pain – “Stranger On The Shore,” a hit record before I existed and
one of the first pieces of music I learned to play. The tune was not specifically
written for a children’s television series – it was initially called “Jenny” in
honour of Acker Bilk’s daughter – but was used as the theme to one. Stranger On The Shore was actually about
a young French au pair coming over to
live and work in Brighton and having to deal with the striking cultural
differences (one of its leading actors, Richard Vernon, would later appear in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy)
but the music far outlived the show’s premise and became a symbol of the
wonderful new world that 1962 seemed to promise (prior to the brutal
near-quietus in October), a future that promised to be better than the one
which people got, and yet the record was also a connecting vessel to the past –
the unexpected and ambiguous final chord change suggests “Sleep well, Britain”
as surely and uncertainly as Mantovani’s “The Theme From Moulin Rouge” had done nine years before.

“Stranger” was also heard on the Apollo 10 lunar module and
perhaps its reappearance on Chill Out
signifies a marooned satellite, doomed to orbit around our sky forever. But
this is largely a story of pop without the rock ‘n’ roll – until right at the
end, when we hear a looped guitar figure which turns out to be a sample of “Eruption”
from the first Van Halen album – Van fans will know that this segues straight
into their “You Really Got Me” – which in 1978 was the nearest most of America
got to “punk rock.” Above them we hear the reassuring tones of Tommy Vance – “Rock
radio…into the nineties…and beyond…”

But wait! Tommy Vance? Out here on the Gulf Coast?
And what are those Tuvan throat singers doing there…and when did we hear sheep
in the Deep South? The cover betrays more than
it thinks you know, for towards the end of the album, although we still hear
interjections from, inter alia, Jerome
Moross’ theme to The Big Country, we
also hear the sound of a very un-American rain and windscreen wipers – and we
realise that it has become dull and overcast and that we have been in
grim-up-north-and-south Britain all the time. The incremental autumn is as
unexpected and moving as the second side of New
Gold Dream. The journey moves on, but at an increasing distance, as though
the disappearing world were saying goodbye.

In retrospect, it is probably best to view Boney M as an art
project. Here is a world where the base matter of pop music – be it “No Woman
No Cry” or “Heart Of Gold” or “My Cherie Amour” or “Have You Ever Seen The
Rain?” or even “Dreadlock Holiday” – is treated as a catalyst for commentary on
pop music. The concept probably rocked better than the reality, but from “Nightflight
To Venus” onwards there was this obsession of escaping the world, the planet –
and a few years later in the eighties something like “Exodus (Noah’s Ark 2001)”
will reinforce this urge.

Boney M – a group whose backing musicians once included
Michael Cretu – were, as far as Britain was concerned, on a dying fall in 1981.
An album with the unwieldy title of Boonoonoonoos
was recorded, but by the time of its release Bobby Farrell – effectively the
mouthpiece of the group’s creator Frank Farian, in a Charlie McCarthy sense –
had left or been fired (depending on whose story you believe) with no
meaningful group left to promote the record.

No doubt “We Kill The World (Don’t Kill The World),”
released in November 1981, had its eye on a late Christmas number one, but it
wasn’t to be – without promotion and with the single too long for regular radio
airplay, it stalled at #39, and the group did not register another original
single in our Top 40 thereafter. The song comes in two parts – the first begins
with some odd, deep electronic thunderclaps, and then Farian’s voice of bass
doom enters: “I see mushrooms. Atomic mushrooms. I see rockets. Missiles in the
sky.” It could almost be Killing Joke.

The music builds up and then breaks into…an early Bucks Fizz
trot. The singers bark out protests against the destruction of nature, etc.
before a curiously uplifting-sounding chorus. This carries on for a bit before
it stops dead, and then a child’s voice, having some problems with pitching,
enters with a plaintive “Don’t kill the world” plea. He is joined by a children’s
choir – actually it was just two singers, Brian Paul and Brian Sletten, plus
lots of overdubbing and then we get into a “We Are The World”-anticipating
handclap hymn song.

One understands what Farian is trying to achieve here, but
the English-is-not-one’s-first-language trope is harder to overlook than Abba
or Kraftwerk. “Do not destroy basic ground,” “Don’t just talk/Go on and do the
one,” “Pollution robs air to breathe” – there is a fumbling sense to all of
this which is quite touching but the production holds back too much, the rock
guitar stays in the background and aesthetic salvation isn’t quite attained. “The
Land Of Make Believe,” which Bucks Fizz released in the same month and which
went to number one in the New Year, is much tougher, scarier (there is no real
happy ending) and overall hipper. Nonetheless, this is one of the roads which
leads to Enigma – an artefact whose religion isn’t holy, whose sex isn’t sexy,
whose music is more wallpaper than music. Ultimately Enigma failed because its
creator couldn’t keep his eyes off the mirror. Coil at least endeavour to
trespass and question, and even have some worthwhile fun in the process. But if
you want to know why the world shouldn’t be killed, in the last two seconds
when you might only have time to notice the sirens sounding, then Chill Out – of all artefacts! – best maps out the reasons why it, and life, and
progression and punctum, might still matter. We simply have to reach out – and find
our ways of listening.

"Sometimes, though, you want something more:work so intense and compelling you will risk
chaos to get close to it, music that smashes through a world that for all of
its desolation may be taking on too many comforts of familiarity.Sly created a moment of lucidity in the midst
of all the obvious negatives and the false, faked hopes; he made his despair
mean something in the midst of despair it is all too easy to think may mean
nothing at all.He was clearing away the
cultural and political debris that seemed piled up in mounds on the streets, in
the papers, in the record stores; for all of the darkness of what he had to say
and how he said it, his music had the kind of strength and the naked honesty
that could make you want to start over."

Greil Marcus, MysteryTrain, pg. 89

The shock.The
loss.It has been a hard few days now,
with more, I know, to come; and the immediate response here was to be
alienated, utterly, from music.The
ocean of sound was silent, waveless; or even if it did have waves, I was too
numb or worried or angry to be able to hear them.

A shock like this (if indeed you experienced it as shock,
and not sad confirmation) can throw you off of a lot of things, but for me it
brought into almost unbearable contrast what Marcus talks about here – there is
lucid music, music that helps in one way or another, and there is mere
entertainment that gets washed away in the aftermath.Music becomes, everything becomes, terribly
personal, but also bigger than life.New
ties are forged, alliances made, tentative uneasy things are now
impossible.Everything is in a new
light.

I was part of something like this once, on a personal level,
and while I won’t go into details – it is the feeling here that counts – I recall enough of it to remember the
embarrassment, the trickle of details that became upon my questioning a
flood.I wasn’t supposed to know about
any of it, presumably until after the event.My ignorance was required because my loyalty was to the person who really wasn’t supposed to know.I was not just uninvited; I was not trusted,
nor was the person trusted.Suddenly all
became clear, and I wondered, had I not been there that night, who would have told me.

But the upshot was, there were people there, and I wasn’t one of them.Us vs. Them.The disdain of the ultimate Us over all the others. Supposed unity
becomingdisunity, disarray.The only way out is to say, out loud even,
“Well now I know” and not be intimidated, should the time come and you see that
ultimate Us again.But you do see those
who, if you had met them, would have said nothing, very differently.And they respond, by not even replying to a
hello, or being friendly themselves.Because you are, in whatever social order is left, beneath them.Maybe you always were, in their eyes.

In the face of this, writing about Madonna’s The Immaculate Collection is
difficult.Perhaps for some it meets
Marcus’ qualities of toughness and naked honesty, but listening to her remixed
greatest hits does not help with my engagement with the world.She is not able to speak to me, and then I
realized not quite blithely that for the most part even back when these songs
were new, she wasn’t really speaking to me.I was not a Madonna fan in the '80s/'90s apart from a few songs, ones where
I felt she actually was feeling
something and seemed to be speaking from some personal experience.The fact that this is the best-selling album
in 1990 in the UK or her biggest album period worldwide is interesting, but doesn’t
really matter to me here; however I will look at it long enough to perhaps
figure out why.

The liner notes, by Gene Sculatti, are pure praise the
entire way; mysteriously, he has written them in such a way to enthuse
endlessly about her, without actually telling the reader that this is a bunch
of remixes and as such the remixes don’t do much for the songs except make you
want to hear the originals again.I am
under the impression that he was given a list of songs, a word count and a
deadline, or maybe he did know and didn’t bother to tell the reader, as
fundamentally it wouldn’t matter anyway.Look at the cover; she is not there – she whose face was ubiquitous, not
there.(There are plenty of the equally
ubiquitous Herb Ritts photos inside, where she looks like a glammed up Chico
Marx, or perhaps Pinocchio.)She is
Brand Madonna now and does not need to put her face on this collection.

Sculatti defends True Blue, he burbles on about “Hot” radio
formats (mentioning Shannon’s immortal “Let The Music Play” which just makes me
want to listen to it, and not this).He
mentions how “Vogue” was originally supposed to end the album, but two new
songs finish it instead; I will get to those in a moment.What is more interesting to me is one of the
quotes (unattributed) that starts the piece: “an outrageous blend of Little
Orphan Annie, Margaret Thatcher and Mae West...”

Oh I see.

It has suddenly hit me that the cover of The Face – the one
for January 1990, with the '80s summed up as half-Madonna, half-Thatcher – is
accurate, depressingly so.So many girls
grew up at this time admiring both (and boys as well) that any subversiveness
that Madonna may be trying out there, any defiant gestures, get swept away
bythe notion that She Who Must Be
Obeyed isn’t just Thatcher, but Madonna herself.Only one song on this album is addressed to
girls, and that’s “Express Yourself” (even here she sounds...like a gym
teacher).Sculatti complains that when
Madonna got the cover of TIME and was
questioned about things, no one asked her about music.I felt like hitting my head against the
nearest blunt object.Madonna is a
musician and songwriter, sure, but she was just as much a sizzling look at the time; fashionistas loved her
and still do, in part because of that She Who Must Be Obeyed business as
anything else.*Clearly if you like that
kind of woman, then here she is; but if not, not.But I cannot ignore the fact that when
Thatcher was made to step down from her position as Prime Minister**, this was
the number one album.The end of an
era?How many bought this for the new
songs, or bought it out of some intense hit of nostalgia?After all, this album sums up that go-get-‘em
“hard-hitting” '80s spirit perfectly well, as Madonna – and this isn’t mentioned
– just rolled up her sleeves and ACHIEVED and had a tumultuous marriage and made
some terrible movies but TRIUMPHED IN THE END and then spent 1990 making one
bossy single after another.People love
that kind of story too, and hence, big sales.

If she wasn’t appropriating the voguing scene for her own
ends (the voguing scene is still a thing, by the way) she was taking a song by
Lenny Kravitz (credited) and Ingrid Chavez (not credited, though eventually she
was) and adding a few words to make “Justify My Love.”Madonna as spectacle; Madonna as a woman in a
perfume ad-style video, intoning the words and trying her best to be all
sexy...does it still work?I am not
sure.It is tough to see this song as
sexy when the lyrics are all about what she
wants to do, lyrics that seem to assume the one being addressed is a hapless
male who will fall for something as repulsive and clunky as “tell me your dreams,
am I in them?”I can sense Camille
Paglia*** and a whole host of other feminists talking about turning the tables
on male objectification (well, maybe not Paglia, come to think of it, though
she was obsessed with Madonna) and
the whole strong-female-demanding-pleasure-and-not-feeling-guilty-about-it thing,
but in the end “Justify My Love” is still a song with a woman demanding love
(like “Open Your Heart” with an R rating), but we never find out what he thinks, reacts or feels.Ultimately it is a song to the listener –
there is no Other.She demands, but that
is not enough.

“Rescue Me” is also a song of demands, one where Madonna
goes on and on about how difficult she is, like a European heiress in New York
who is looking for someone very special, darling:she is “silly” and “weak” but also “ferocious.”How ferocious, you might ask?To this possible Other she can say “With you I’m
not a fascist.”Well now.What does this mean?She has an “angry little heart” (immediately
I think of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas)
and this Other can “forgive” this heart.He can also bring her to her knees “while I’m scratching out the
eyes”**** of a world “I want to conquer and deliver and despise.”Oh, that kind of fascism.Yes, I can see why so many Thatcherkids were
Madonna fans; Thatcher wanted (as far as I can tell) some sort of world where
society didn’t exist, but Proud Individuals did;
and here is Madonna, Proud Individual, demanding that a man indulge even her
worst excesses.She wants another Proud
Individual to care for her (interestingly she doesn’t care if he is “good” for
her, just that her understands her and loves her for herself).I think anyone could have told her this is no
way to get a new boyfriend, let alone husband, and just about anyone reading
the lyrics here will already know Madonna is pretentious but almost literally
impossible to be with....and so the album ends, starting out so innocently with
“Holiday” and “Lucky Star” and ending with a woman admitting that she has no
ability to get herself out of her mess, that she must be rescued, which is not
exactly what a “hard-hitting” woman is supposed to be saying.Is it? Oh, but she has so much power....is so
wealthy and famous....is She Who Must Be Obeyed...then this must be okay,
right?

Is there anything left to say?Madonna wrote her best songs here with
Patrick Leonard (the title track and “Cherish” from Like A Prayer).There is, on the cassette, a big blank space
at the end of side one that shouldn’t be there – it could have been used for
“Angel” or “Everybody.” And yes, it is
the end of an era; the liminal period for Madonna is a difficult one, and she
comes out of it as an Official Pop Star who has no time for what is about to
happen.A part of Madonna is stuck in
the 80s, or you could say her persistent Catholic symbols are also part of her
brand.And her impact is huge; this
album is that impact in audio terms, but there’s a whole world of fashion,
videos, movies and live performances
that compounds it.Are the songs
good?I wish I could say that now I get them, now I understand, but I have not been able to; in high school I
didn’t sense they were for me, and I don’t feel it now, either.

And after such a loss, I can’t really take any comfort from
this, even though she campaigned for the right side, up to the end.

Oh wait another minute. Was “Justify My Love” kind of....pointing to Public Enemy?Well, in that case...let us ride The Immaculate Collection into 1991,
where it’s #1 at the start of the Gulf War, and look forward to....

The sound of thunder; and a deep voice comes out and
says:“The Future Holds Nothing Else But
Confrontation.”A droning noise straight
out of shoegaze, looking to beginning grime; and the drums and Chuck D and so
many bits of samples and scratches that they scatter around like a popcorn
machine going full tilt.“Lost At Birth”
is a reclamation, after much strife; Public Enemy are about the cause “we’re
all in the same game.”Not just Proud
Individuals here, but also and especially Proud and Strong Unities. And if
you’re down with PE, then they are down with you.

“Now the KKK are wearing three-piece suits.”

This is what I needed to hear, after such a loss.And it is RELENTLESS.I cannot even keep up with them, it is next
to useless; there is a momentum to this album that is exactly what Marcus is
talking about.Here is naked honesty,
tons of energy, more than enough to get the listener to keep going, no not just
keep going but to actively do something, to educate themselves.“Can’t Truss It” presents slavery and
oppression that is “inconceivable” and yet unnervingly still present. Have
times changed all that much?

“The story I’m kicking is Goree.”“Yipes.”Ofra Haza.This is music that
sets music free; endless possibilities and beats and messages are here. “Lyrical Content May Offend!” says the sticker
on the cassette, and “I Don’t Wanna Be Called Yo Niga” is pure Lenny Bruce in a
way Bruce could never be; conversational, blunt, funny (it is Flavor Flav).But can PE’s message be heard?Not according to “How To Kill A Radio
Consultant” (PE are taking NO PRISONERS).But the interlude – Chuck D telling like it is, looking at the church
and liquor store as equal foes of the neighbourhood – is depressingly familiar.

Eventually PE just give up on being played on the
radio.“I can’t live without my radio!”

And now a song about...well, about the “psychological
discomfort” that is there and still there. “ByThe Time I Get To Arizona” is
about Martin Luther King Jr., about jails, about the desert – “what’s a smiling
face, when the whole state’s racist?”“The same old ways that kept us dying.”All tosomething that sounds like
Sly alright.BUT THEN THE SCREAMS OF THE
CROWD!The loop of excitement.“Talkin’ MLK, gonna find a way...This ain’t
no damn dream.”“The hard boulevard I
need it now more than ever.”Reparations, anyone?One day is
just the start. *****

Some critics think that the second side isn’t as good as the
first.Cough.

“See, the black race can’t afford you no more.”What is “Move” about?“I’d rather rush a television reporter.”And it’s about speed, about the truth, “I’d
rather spend my time spitting on a bigot.”What is the truth?Who has the
money?“If you ain’t with the
program....”“This is a new day!”Countdown to a new world, where PE still
exist despite so many people who would like them to quietly go away.“’91 PE in full effect.”

IT’S A BLACK THING
YOU’VE GOT TO UNDERSTAND

“1 Million Bottlebags” goes back to the world of liquor
stores, advertising and the inordinate amount of it aimed at the black
consumers in the US – “slaves to the liquorman!”Flavor Flav is trying to get a man to stop
drinking his 40 – “another gun to the brain.”This is like an update of “The Bottle” by Gil Scott-Heron.Profit and greed....

“Shut ‘Em Down” is a particular fave of mine, because Chuck
D says something like “Ted Hughes, gettin’ me sued” even though he doesn’t.That aside, it’s about economics, the truth,
and shutting down....oh come on now, how could I not mention this....

“Fashion Week and it’s Shut Down, Went To The Show Sitting
In The Front Row in A Black Tracksuit and it’s SHUT DOWN” – yes, Skepta, he
knows what this about...just slow it down to a rough funk...

“We spend money to no end, looking for a friend.”Stop Funding Hate.Stop Voting For Politicians Who Don’t Care
For You.

And now, a friendly word from your local KKK – Bernie Crosshouse,
who is pleased to see “gangs, hoodlums, drug pushers and users” destroying
black communities, so he doesn’t have to.All with country violins and yahoos and hollers in the background.Yeah, and who did a lot of country stars vote
for?My question, and I don’t know if it
can be answered.Unfortunately, I can’t
ignore such things.....

“A Letter To the New York Post” is perhaps what those
critics objected to;both the Post and Jet get it in the neck; “it always seems they make our neighborhood
look bad.”You can hear Chuck D’s glee
in getting his own back, and Flavor Flav as well; so much controversy had been
around PE that they had to take (or not)....

“Get The F--- Outta Dodge” is about Chuck D driving somewhere in
the South, getting pulled over by the cops and being told to turn down his
radio – and drove out as soon as he could...then being pulled over again in
NYC, because he was driving a pick-up truck.Then the rookie raps, eager to shoot, eager to arrest.Lest we forget, this album comes at a time
when the L.A. Riots are mere months away....

As gravy, the glorious return of “Bring Tha Noize
(w/Anthrax)” which is just as rocking and joyful and OH YES as “Rock Box” was
back in the day.Anthrax yell, rap, rock
and the Golden Age of Musical Understanding is happening, oh YEAAAAAAAAAAAH
BOOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

And then back to the tough “hear the drummer get wicked”
loop, and the ending, a wordless tough beat, as if they are moving way ahead of
“Justify My Love” to something more inclusive, more responsive, though just as
demanding, in its own way.

Yes, this is the music Marcus meant; the focus is sharper,
the angles more acute, but this is the point – this music does not draw back or
flinch, and it gives the listener a lot to think about, to get angry about, and
a kind of propelling oomph that gives hope and determination, that possibly may
even unify.

And now, to the present, and two Canadian albums of note:

One quality of There’s
A Riot Goin’ On That Marcus talks about is the fact that not everything is
very clear, that there is a sense you have to lean into the album to really get
it.Brendan Canning’s album HomeWreckingYears comes closest to the eerie and
yet familiar feelings I get when I hear Riot;
it doesn’t have the same menace, but the more you listen to it, the more obvious
it is that there are stories galore in it, enough to build a whole novel out
of, I suspect.And there is a languor
about it that threw early reviewers off, who just heard another summertime-finelaid-back Brendan Canning album.It is
that, but the complicated thing is, it’s telling a story of deceit and
betrayal, cheating and being caught, as well.All the qualities of Canning’s voice work well here – he is close to
you, very quiet at times, and you have to listen intently, crouch down, to get
what he is saying.I don’t know how much
of what he is singing about is from him, from his friends, how much is
autobiographical or if it is made up.But it doesn’t matter, as it feels genuine and all the language of
“Vibration Walls” and “Keystone Dealers” is at once normal and just weird/creepy,
and by thetime he sings about “I found
us some cheap seats in the balcony” you know something very wrong is happening,
yet the music is gentle and spaced-out...

...that is, until it gets to “Nashville Late Pass.”I don’t care if this is just music that he
jammed with his band to, this about being caught out, about the pause between
the knowledge and the reaction, about the awkwardness and the words may be “accidents,
they will happen” but Justin Peroff’s drumming lets you know the thunderous
reactions, the explosion, the music roars along and everything is being
connected, falling into place.There is
nowhere to hide.It skips and starts, it
is anything but laid back.Canning
becomes almost inaudible, as the music just takes OVER and then stops, cutting
off suddenly, like a door being slammed shut.

The songs are
different afterwards – “Work Out In The Wash” is about guilt, using others,
taking off clothes....there is a resigned quality to this, as if he knows it’s
over but is going to act normal until something is figured out.So it sounds a lot happier than it is....”keep
it coming, love”....”Money Mark” is so much a song about things going downhill,
as the bass does.A knot is being undone
musically, and she sings “you’re the young gun anyway.”How many relationships are falling apart
here?Hard to tell, but it’s happening.“So long to the innocent goodbye...here comes
the evening train, goodnight.”And so
the train pulls away, the tracks and train making the noise “money mark, money
mark, money mark...”

“Sleeping Birds Like Lasers” is about that quiet moment when
things are said.“No more room in the
spotlight....can we stop at this next light....okay, okay...you want me to....”Or is it “you want me too”?But I think it must be “you want me to go...”
The fact of going is too awful to say. (You see how complicated this album
is.)The song clatters along uneasily,
breath heavy and drawing in slowly.It
is over.

“Baby’s Going Her Own Way” is self-explanatory, save for the
fact the narrator is asking her not to leave, now.And yet is sounds upbeat, settled.Everything is on an even keel again.Who is this Anna in this song?Yet another girl?(There’s an earlier song called “Hey Marika,
Get Born.”) But no matter what the narrator says, she is going and not coming
back.Even a “I’m sorry” doesn’t
work.So he turns mean, says she will “fade
away” if she goes.And the bass gulps
like a thirsty person, and the guitars and drums gently disappear...

For an album which is essentially – as far as I can tell –
just an example of what Canning and his touring band can do, this is a
remarkable album and not one that has had much if any coverage in the UK at
all.I only found it by accident a month
after it was supposed to appear, tucked away in a mall I’d never been to
before. Now, I realize it might annoy some people that this album asks you to
listen and make up a narrative, but it is therefore making you participate in
its meaning – you can become part of the
album if you wish, and if you’ve lived in Toronto then its easy to think of all
this taking place over one hot, humid summer, and resolving in the cool of
autumn, when sleep is easier...

It was always the plan. Patrick Leonard had worked with
Madonna, so of course Leonard Cohen had to be included.It was only right.I hardly know what to write here.I tweeted about Montreal, the river, the
bridges, the languages.Cohen knew he
was coming to the end, that he had to
look back to Montreal again, to Greece, to the synagogue where he first heard
music.The whole sweep of so many places
and people.Patrick Leonard does right
by him, giving his knowing, bleakly funny at times writing the gentlest and
most understanding of frames, and Adam Cohen deserves our thanks for
encouraging his father and making this album possible in the first place.It can seem depressing at first – the darkness,
equal to Sly Stone’s darkness – but Cohen wishes the listener well, and longs
for love and peace, actual love, genuine peace.This was also good to hear, after the loss.He is leaving, he knows things are
inconsequential to him – but then how much truly is consequential in actual lived life?

Truth will out; time will tell what it is that counts.Cliches?Maybe, but Cohen stickhandles around these things very slowly and
surely, as if he is showing us a map and noting places, dangers, decisions.This is his life; this is his wisdom, this in
his way is his UnpopularSolutions.He is “out of the game” but still watching
and able to comment; the old player who sees that the game may have appeared to
change superficially, but really hasn’t at all.Cohen knows
in a way that can be utterly trusted, and you don’t have to risk anything to
reach it, other than looking to the world with more intention, of being more
mindful.Unlike Canning, you know what Cohen is saying, there are no
complex narratives that could be rewritten with each new hearing.Cohen is setting it out straight, to meditate
upon, giving the listener just enough before going.It is as if he is giving us this one last
time, as close as he can be, as accurate as he can call it.

And so I return to Madonna and wonder if she could do this,
with Patrick Leonard’s help.Hmm.We shall see.It is 1991 now, the palindromic year, and as Cohen writes the songs for TheFuture
(including the ever-hopeful “Democracy”) and the liminal period is reaching its
peak.Anything is possible, or so it
seems....

*”I love the way that she clearly enjoys her clothes, and
that she’s this very hard-hitting, tough seeming person.She holds her own in a man’s world and she’s
doesn’t want to be granted any favours because she’s a woman.But at the same time she had really great red
nail polish on when she opened the Tory party conference, and lipstick.” – UK Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman on
Theresa May, ES magazine, October 21,
2016 The same things could have been said about Thatcher, and certainly are
about Madonna.

***Honest to God, the only time I’m going to mention her
here. The split face thing TheFace did with Thatcher and Madonna is also
there(this time it’s Emily Dickinson
and Nefertiti ) on the cover of her most famous book, SexualPersonae.

****Considering how much endless looking into eyes Madonna
sang about in the early 80s, this signifies that she is all done with looking
into eyes and trying to understand people, I guess.

*****When PE were the support act for U2 on their ’92 tour,
they played this song in Arizona as the last song in their set.Chuck D was a bit nervous about doing it, but
at Bono’s insistence he did.I can only
assume U2 went on to do a storming “Pride (In The Name Of Love).”Considering how controversial the video was,
it was brave of both of them.